Pankaj Ramanbhai Patel and Family

Zydus built a generics business and then attempted something harder: developing its own drugs.

Zydus Lifesciences, which the Patel family has built over seven decades from a company founded in 1952, sits in the tier of Indian pharmaceutical companies that have grown past generics manufacturing into research-driven drug development without fully completing that transition. Pankaj Patel has led the company's push toward innovation, investing in a drug discovery programme that has produced a small number of original molecules alongside the broader generics and biosimilars portfolio. The most notable result to date was ZyCoV-D, a plasmid DNA vaccine against COVID-19 developed entirely in-house and approved in India in 2021, one of the few COVID vaccines developed indigenously anywhere in the world.

The company operates in over 55 countries with a portfolio spanning generics, biosimilars, consumer wellness products and active pharmaceutical ingredients. Patel's stated ambition has been to build a discovery-driven company rather than one that depends permanently on copying molecules developed elsewhere. That is a more capital-intensive and uncertain path than the generics model, but it is the one that determines whether Indian pharmaceutical companies eventually compete at the front of the innovation cycle.